July 14,
2008: Sweden recently passed an
electronic eavesdropping law that, they admitted, was mainly to enable Swedish
intelligence agencies to comb through Russian data traffic and sell goodies to
other nations. Because of Swedens location, both geographically and in terms of
how Internet traffic flows, about 80 percent of Russian Internet traffic and
phone calls pass through Sweden. Russia can avoid this by rerouting its
communications, but this would take time, and lots of money. In any event, many
of those other countries already have similar laws. Meanwhile, Sweden will grab
all the Russian secrets they can.
In
reality, the Swedes will not sell the Russian data, but will trade with other
nations that are big in the data collection business (the U.S., Britain and
Australia), who might have something of particular interest to Sweden. Having
something to trade also enables Sweden to get warnings that they are being
spied upon. The espionage business if often all about trading favors, and being
known as someone who might have something useful to put on the table.
